Prospect Congregational United Church of Christ

In Revelations of Divine Love, 14^th century mystic, Julian of Norwich proclaimed

“the fulness of joy is to behold God in all,” that is, in every part of creation.[1] 

I confess that I often feel closest to God when I’m out in the natural world, marveling at the incredibly varied greens of spring, the sweet fruits of summer, the rich colors of autumn, and sparkling snowscapes in winter.  Whose heart doesn’t soar when the clouds lift and Tahoma, Mount Rainier, appears towering majestically in the distance?

In scripture, I especially resonate with the opening of John’s gospel: “When all things began, the Word already was.  The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was.  The Word then was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him.  All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it.”[2]

This passage places the Word or Christ outside of time and space, a truly cosmic, transcendent Christ, who is at the same time very much in the world that we see, hear, smell, and touch in our daily lives.  God in and around us, manifest not just in humanity, but in all life.  

In the opening chapter of the Hebrew scriptures, we read that God created our universe out of the void, out of nothingness, in a series of stages, and that it was good.  In today’s reading from the second chapter we hear that humanity was formed from the dirt, and placed in a God made garden to tend it.  Friends, we have been given a planet suited to an abundance of life forms, a planet with all that we need to thrive, and given a purpose -- to tend what God has made.  The first chapter speaks of humanity, male and female, as being created in God’s image and likeness. The English translations say that we were given dominion over all the earth and earth’s creatures, but from a Jewish scholar I learned that the Hebrew verbs “radah and kavash imply that man is to rule over the animals as his subjects, not as a dictator, but a benevolent leader. Man is also to walk among and have a relationship with his subjects so that they can provide for man and that man can "learn" from them.”[3]

The name Adam is also the word for earth or soil.  We, made of humus, are here to tend God’s garden planet with humility, respect, and an openness to learning. 

In a recent dialog on the Climate Crisis, Rabbi Jennie Rosenn focused on her faith’s respect for and appreciation of the power and beauty of Creation as expressed in the repeated refrain of the Shabbat morning liturgy “How Great is your Work, O God!”  She also affirmed that the care of creation rests on humanity and that, “if we destroy creation, there will be no one after us to mend it.”[4]

It seems to me that in our Western colonial cultures we, by misinterpreting Genesis, have come to view ourselves as masters of the universe rather than caretakers of an intricately interrelated earthly community.  We tend to see land as a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited for whatever pleases us. 

In Western philosophy and science we are often given to analysis, seeking to break things down into their smallest distinct parts to understand them. But we are discovering – or rediscovering – that everything is connected and interconnected and cannot thrive or even survive in isolation, and that to understand anything we need to understand more about the interconnections by which each part influences the others.

Without understanding of and respect for the interconnections of all of life and even the parts of creation that we consider inanimate, we make terrible mistakes in our efforts to make life on earth more comfortable for our species.  As when people sought to eliminate malaria by spraying DDT widely to kill mosquitos. Sadly, DDT killed a host of other insects as well, harmed animals that eat insects, including song birds, and even impacted meat eating species such as eagles.[5]  It is hard to say how large a part the widespread use of insecticides plays in species extinction around the globe, including the pollinators on which plant life depends.

Our Indigenous neighbors have a more spiritual understanding of the land, as evidenced in this quote from Chief Seattle: “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.”  The Lakota people among whom I lived for 3 years often speak of  “Mitakuye oyasin”, translated as “all my relatives,” or “we are all related.” They are not speaking just of human tribes, but of all life, all of creation.  The Japanese Shinto religion is especially known for its reverence and gratitude to the land, nature, and the life that natural elements give to human beings.  The ancient Japanese culture saw each part of the natural world as having its own spirituality, being born from a divine couple. “Therefore, the relationship between the natural environment of this world and people is that of blood kin, like the bond between brother and sister.”[6]  We encounter a similar mindset in Francis of Assisi, who spoke of Sister Moon and brother wolf, and in other Christian mystics, including Meister Eckhart, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich.  A similar deep appreciation of God in nature is found in Celtic Christianity. 

I have found that Indigenous communities have much to teach us about the web of life and Mother Earth because of their focus on this interconnectedness of life and their careful observation of local environments over many generations. 

Two years ago, I read a book called Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard who grew up in a family of settlers engaged in logging, and living close to an indigenous community in western Canada. Back when clear cutting was the favored approach of the timber industry, she was sent to discover why some of the firs in the tree plantations were not doing as well as the healthy young fir trees in the natural forest. She found that in the natural forest, the more the birch trees shaded the fir seedlings, the more carbon in the form of photosynthetic sugars birches provided to them through the mycorrhizal network below ground.  Suzanne listened to the forest in ways she had learned from her Indigenous neighbors. 

In further research, Suzanne found that trees recognize their own kin and favor them when the saplings are most vulnerable, but they also help other species, as when birches give sugars to fir trees in the summer and the firs return the favor by sending food to birches in the spring and fall, when the birches lack leaves.  Suzanne has shown us that forests are not collections of isolated organisms but webs of constantly evolving relationships.  By showing us that plants form communities that transform an environment into an ecology that depends on all members , Suzanne has challenged  the belief  that a life form only ever seeks to benefit itself or another member of its own species.[7]

Plants teach us that biodiversity leads to resilience. Species collaborate. It’s a synergistic system. One plant has a high photosynthetic capacity, and it fuels soil bacteria that fix nitrogen. Then there’s this other deep-rooted plant, and it goes down and brings up water, which it shares with the nitrogen-fixing plant because those plants need a lot of water to carry out their activities. So suddenly the whole productivity of the ecosystem goes way up.

Today we look at things like the human genome and realize that a lot of our DNA is of viral or bacterial origin. We now know that we ourselves are consortiums of species that evolved together.